


Still Burning Bright

by Demi Wolfe (icarusfalls)



Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 06:51:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10916589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarusfalls/pseuds/Demi%20Wolfe
Summary: An AU Ryden fic based upon the lyrics to Trade Mistakes by Panic! at the Disco.





	Still Burning Bright

I stare down at the amber drink in the icy glass, my fingers dancing across the rim. Whiskey on the rocks, a splash of Coke. I smile - it isn’t my drink, but it’s his, and it tastes like him. It burns the corners of my lips like his did when he’d take a sip and then kiss me deep. A laugh bubbles out of my throat, low and almost dejected. I can see the patrons at the table beside me raise their brows, look at each other. They’re just part of my periphery, and my eyes focus in on the man fiddling with the amp on stage. I take him in, every inch of his familiarity, the mop of dark brown hair, the brown button down, the boyish face with a thin layer of manly stubble.

I wonder what he’d think if he saw me here, tonight, hiding at a back table. I don’t want him to see me, but part of me lets my breath hitch every time his eyes give a cursory glance around the room, even as I sink down into my shoulders and duck behind the rapidly emptying glass in my grip. It’s cold and wet and yet the liquid stings my insides just like his eyes did.

His electric acoustic comes to rest in his lap, and I can hear his voice before he even speaks, ringing in my ears like a goddamn daydream that I can simultaneously reach and will never again be able to touch. He deserves so much more than this, than the open-mics and the drunken patrons. He deserves fame, and glory, and -- well, and better than I could’ve ever given him.

“Hey folks,” He starts, his tone smooth and easy like the whiskey in my glass. Hasn’t changed. Never could, I’d wager. I lick my lips. “M’ name’s Ryan Ross, and I, uh --” He stops himself a moment, tongue tied. I think maybe he’s spotted me and I recede further down onto the barstool, eyes closed, heart pounding. He catches up to his own mind a moment later, licking his lips. “I’d uh, I’d like to play you a few songs.

And he starts playing. God, he does, and I can feel every inch of my body stop working. It’s like I’ve been deserted, abandoned by every organ inside of myself. Stuck in my skin but unable to run or to move to even breathe. The songs are different than they’d once been, but I can read between the lines.

They aren’t about me anymore.

I should be happy.

He’s halfway through his first song when I knock back the rest of my whiskey. I don’t dare get up, don’t dare venture to the bar where the light might hit my face. Don’t want him to know I’m here, that I flew halfway across the country to see him play in a small little bar that a friend of a friend mentioned he might be at. Don’t want him to know I’m spending my time thinking about him when I could be spending it with anyone else.

Don’t want him to know how I’m still hurting.

So I sit. I sit and I close my eyes. He’s still as bright of a star as he ever was, but without all the lights and the drama. Without the dancers and the swaying hips and the temptation of everything that tour life came with. Maybe this is better for him; but hell, aren’t I a hypocrite for thinking so? This had always been his dream - there I was, living it for him. Without him. Without any of them.

I’ve made so many mistakes in my life, mistakes that I can no longer rid myself of. I’d give anything to trade them for some other transgressions or to forget them at all.

A waitress passes me - I don’t mean to, but I grab her arm, wrapping long and calloused fingers around her soft skin. Her breath catches, and she looks at me with panic and confusion in her eyes. I’m murmuring instantaneous apologies, biting on my lip, heaving low sighs. “Another whiskey, if you could, I’m sorry, I’m so --” But she’s nodding and leaving, obviously wanting to get away from the crazy man hiding behind his sunglasses in an already dark bar.

I shouldn’t have come, shouldn’t have given in to this side of me. Sentimental boy. What a fool I am.

I realize I’ve missed most of his set, his few songs flying by with the brush of his nimble fingers over metal strings, the way he drops his pick and stoops off his stool to pick it up. It isn’t fair how he’s made my entire body go so numb that I can’t even enjoy him from a distance. I want to hate him for it, but I know I have no room for that in my already suffocating heart. There are too many holes, too much pain.

I wonder if I left him the same way. Cellophane tape does a shitty job of piecing a person back together. I hope he’s found something stronger, or better yet that he’s not broken at all.

“I’ve got one last song for you all, and I -- well, it’s an old one but a good one and I’m -- well, I’m hoping that maybe you enjoy it. You might’ve heard this, it’s called Behind the Sea.”

I feel my soul leave my body.

I thought maybe I had gotten what I wanted, the closure that he had forgotten all about me and had carried on. That he was counting sheep at night instead of seeing my face speaking those words like some fucked up murder scene on the back of his eyelids every time he closed them.

This feels like some kind of joke. We haven’t spoken since it happened, since we went our separate ways and I left a piece of me with him. I think he’d gone to Seattle or Portland, somewhere in the Northwest to get over me. Me? I’d just gone to the studio. Business as usual.

What an idiot I was.

And here he is, hanging on to words he wrote with me in the bed next to him, a barricade of empty beer bottles keeping the world from us, a maze through which only the bravest dare tiptoe. Our piece of paradise, that room that smelled of hops and sweat and marijuana. The smell that had woven itself into the very fibers of our sheets and hair and skin and, hell, our very souls. I could’ve spent an eternity in that room with him, listening to the way he made would-be nonsense sound like miracles.

I stand up halfway through the song, the bitter taste in my mouth spreading like wildfire. I watch him a moment as I fish out some money for the whiskey I ordered but won’t end up drinking tonight. He doesn’t notice me, doesn’t even look up. I don’t know why I’d want him to, but I wait, like maybe there will be a moment where the energy in the room will light up a neon sign that says ‘me, me, look at me!’

The moment doesn’t come. His eyes are closed, lips parted as he sings, and I can hear the harmonies that aren’t there. I can hear my voice, can see the flower-tangled microphone stands, can smell the scent of sweat and cologne and two thousand bodies pressing closer, harder, nearer wanting parts of us we’re not prepared to give.

It’s like I’ve fallen back into 2008 and I can’t get out. But why would I want to? Why would I want to leave behind the one time when all of this felt right?

“Brendon?”

  
Shit. I’ve been standing too long, and the microphone has picked up my name. His voice saying my name. It carries over the loudspeaker like a fucking gunshot and I’m still frozen. I barely croak out a sound, jaw slack and open and eyes staring through the darkened haze the glasses have provided. I want to die. I might already be dead.

And then he’s moving towards me. It’s hard to comprehend it, all that’s happening, and I can feel my soul cave in on itself. My feet, by some miraculous stroke of luck, have started moving and I’m pushing confused bystanders out of the way as I hurry out the door and into the street. I can hear him saying my name, but whether it’s reality or just a constant replay of that tone, that low voice over the sound system--

The had around my forearm stops me dead, and I know the answer. I feel the tug, the twist, my body spins, and then contact. The fist to the face, the ache of bone hitting bone buffered only by a thin layer of flesh and tendons.

I’m sent reeling, collapsing to the ground. I can feel my palms scrape the concrete like I’m a boy on the playground again, only this isn’t some far-off memory of an easier time. No, this is fucking hard and I’m aching all over, and my face is going to have one hell of a bruise.

“What the hell, Brendon?” His voice is angry. Of course it is, he has every right to be angry. He’s the one that left, but I’m the one that rode the coattails of success off everything we’d built together. What else was I supposed to do? It was my dream too… even if my dream originally had him in it.

It takes me a moment to regain myself enough to speak, but when I do, what comes out of my mouth is not what I intended. Half of me expected to ask for forgiveness, to say something to placate him, but instead I’m yelling. I’m dragging my lightly-bloodied palms off the pavement and standing up, smearing a pale coat of red on the dark denim of my pants. I’m standing up, and I’m swinging at him, asking who the hell he thinks he is.

That’s the problem, though. He knows exactly who is he. I’m still searching, still trying to find out the same thing about me. Rockstar is a tricky thing to define, after all, and it seems to me I’m a different person in every city, and another when I come home.

Ryan has always been quicker on his feet than me, and impossibly more waifish than I ever was. I scowl as he dodges the throes, and he’s grappling with me in the next moment, arms around my middle, head under my arm, trying to push me down. We’re making a scene, and we’re drawing a crowd, and god damnit my sunglasses are gone.

Not the reunion I wanted for us.

I find myself on my back on the ground with Ryan on top of me, straddling me, hands wrapped around my wrists as he forces my hands to either side of my shoulder. I scowl and thrash, and part of me is reminded of all the days left wrestling with him in the summers of our youth and I want to kiss him. I want to lean up and let him taste the whiskey on my tongue the way I used to taste it on his when he’d steal half-finished bottles out of his dad’s sleeping grasp. I’m too angry to do that just now, but I give up fighting. I go limp beneath him.

His eyes aren’t angry anymore, but a mix of confusion and pain. The world seems to stop as our gazes meet, one of his hands letting go of my skin to come and touch my jaw. I wince, visibly, at the mere idea of it. His touch gets impossibly slower, gracing the side of my face. I can taste blood - I hadn’t noticed that a minute ago.

No, this wasn’t how I wanted this to go.

I take in a deep breath, and I let my vision go back into focus for the first time since I tried to make a clean break from inside of the bar. The crowd is dissipating, not a group of people who give a shit who I am or why I’m there. I can see Ryan swallow, note the clench of his jaw and then the relaxation of it, the way his throat rises and falls and the tension from his shoulders gets better and then worse again.

“What the hell are you doing here?” He asks, and his voice cracks like it always used to when he was nervous. I laugh, softly, mostly breath, and shake my head. “Who knows,” I answer. “Making another mistake, obviously.”

The concrete is hard under me, and it’s cold. I’m sure the leather of my jacket is scuffed but I can hardly bring myself to think about it. He’s on me and the weight of him is like another punch back to the past that I resigned myself to losing.

“You came to see me.” Ryan says, looking down at me with puppy dog eyes that used to make me see magic and rainbows. They used to light up - hell, they still do. I saw it first hand while he was up there singing. That’s what had mattered to him, though, the music. He’d wanted to pursue a different sound. It wasn’t what sold and I took the label’s side.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“I just happened to walk in.”

“You don’t even live around --”

“Look,” I snap, defeated and tired as I shy away from yet another stroke to my bruising cheek. “If we’re going to do this can we do it somewhere else?” I ask, eyes flickering around. No need to continue airing our far-too-dirty laundry for the world to see and hear and tweet about.

“Right. Yes. Okay. I just have to get my stuff.”

He's less angry now. I'm grateful. He gestures for me to wait...

And I do.


End file.
